Commonplace book

orig. A book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement.1578 COOPERThesaurus A studious yong man ... may gather to himselfe good furniture both of words and approved phrases ... and to make to his use as it were a common place booke. 1642 FULLERHoly & Prof. St. A Common-place-book contains many notions in garrison, whence the owner may draw out an army into the field.

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Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The California novelist James D. Houston died last Thursday from cancer at the age of seventy-five. Houston taught at Santa Cruz while I was an undergraduate there. During those years he assisted his wife Jeanne Wakatsuki in writing Farewell to Manzanar, a memoir of the Japanese American internment during the Second World War. They had been married fifteen years before she finally confided to him that her family had been interned at Manzanar during the war.

A San Francisco native, Houston was educated at San Jose State and Stanford, where he studied under Wallage Stegner. (At Santa Cruz he was colleagues with Page Stegner, Wallace’s son. His closest friend on campus, though, was Ray Carver.) Between Battles (1968), his first novel, was based on his experience in the U.S. Air Force. Gig (1969) and A Native Son of the Golden West (1971) were the novels that all of the young writers at Santa Cruz read. The first was about a jazz pianist, the second about a surfer. Houston was not yet forty, and seemed to understand the countercultural youth about as well as we understood ourselves. Better, the truth is.

He also coauthored San Francisco 49er quarterback John Brodie’s memoir Open Field (1974). And he wrote five more novels, including Snow Mountain Passage (2001), about the Donner Party, and Bird of Another Heaven, a historical romance about the last king of Hawaii and his great-great grandson, which was published two years ago by Knopf.

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D. G. Myers

A critic and literary historian for nearly a quarter of a century at Texas A&M and Ohio State universities, I am the author of The Elephants Teach and ex-fiction critic for Commentary. I have also written for Jewish Ideas Daily, the New York Times Book Review, the Weekly Standard, Philosophy and Literature, the Sewanee Review, First Things, the Daily Beast, the Barnes & Noble Review, the Journal of the History of Ideas, American Literary History, and other journals. Here is the Commonplace Blog’s statement of principles, such as they are.